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THE
DEPTH OF THE SOUL: JAMES HILLMAN’S VISION OF PSYCHOLOGY Sanford
L. Drob For the past quarter century James Hillman
has been creating a new vision of psychology, one in which psychology becomes
a "supreme discipline" concerned not only with the psyche of
humanity but the "soul" which is at the heart of the world.
Vilified by some, he has been called brilliant, explosive and poetic by
others. His ideas, through their popularization in the writings of the best
selling author, Thomas Moore (1992, 1994), have reached millions, yet he is
unheard of by many professional psychologists. While some psychologists have
applauded Hillman's call for a return of the soul to a central place in
psychology (Elkins, 1995), others have been put off by the fact that
Hillman's own writings are critical of the humanist tradition, highly
provocative and occasionally abstruse. Hillman has been consistently critical of
what he regards to be the basic assumption of contemporary humanistic
psychology, the unity and essential "health" of the self. He is also
critical of the humanistic (and spiritual) focus upon self-actualization and
spirituality, as opposed to an experience of the chaos, multiplicity, and
disentegrative aspects of the soul and the world (Hillman, 1977, pp. 180-3;
Hillman, 1979). Yet a close examination of Hillman's ideas reveals them to be
of great interest to humanistic psychologists and his position is far closer
to humanistic/ spiritual psychology than he himself cares to acknowledge. In this paper I will explore Hillman's
psychology, touching upon points of contact and relevance to the Kabbalah. Dogma and Deconstruction Part of Hillman's plan is to shake us up
intellectually, to actually enact what the Kabbalists refer to as the
"Breaking of the Vessels," i.e. to disintegrate our fixed patterns
of thought in order that a bit of genuine creativity, a "divine
spark" or "soul" can make its way through our routinized
system of beliefs. There is thus a sense in which Hillman's ideas are, for
him, themselves expendable, weapons in the assault against our comfortable
dogmas, to be laid down once their deconstructive task has been achieved. At
times it seems that for Hillman it is the disintegration of theory and dogma
which is creative and interesting and not the new theories that arise in the
old theories' place. To become an adherent of Hillman's ideas would itself
call for a new assault, etc. Nevertheless there are certain recurring themes,
most of which are themselves partly disintegrative or deconstructive in
intent which can be said to characterize Hillman's point of view, and amongst
these, the one that best characterizes Hillman's overall perspective is his
concern with the "depth of the soul". The Depth of The Soul "The soul", according to
Hillman, is the proper subject matter of psychology. Bettleheim (1984) has
pointed out in his brief but wonderful volume Freud and Man's Soul,
Freud himself, actually used the German term for soul, "Seele",
when speaking of what is translated into English as the "psychic
apparatus" and by this he made reference to the person's most inner,
vital sense of "meaning". For Hillman, the soul generally lays
hidden behind our routines, dogmas and fixed beliefs. Soul, according to
Hillman is most apt to emerge in those chaotic, "pathological",
moments when we experience the disintegration of our beliefs, values, and
security. For it is in such moments that that our imagery, emotions, desires
and values are heightened and we have the fullest awareness of the psyche in
its essential form. Here, Hillman provides us with a psychological
application of the Kabbalistic act of Birur, the extrication of the
inner divine self, the spark of divine light that lays hidden within the
human personality. For Hillman, the very point of deconstructing our fixed
ideas in psychology and elsewhere is to provide us with the conditions for
the revelation of psyche itself. Hillman says five more things about the
nature of the soul: the soul (1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns
events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience,
(4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death
(Hillman, 1977, p. xvi, Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47). For Hillman, as a result
of these five characteristics, the soul is the "imaginative possibility
of our nature", a possibility that is realized in reflective
speculation, dream, image, and fantasy. Death is significant for soul because
possibility (and hence imagination) derives from an existential recognition
of one's finitude: what is finite can imagine possibilities, some of which
will be realized, others of which (owing to death) will not (Hillman 1992, p.
xvi, 1989, p. 21). For Hillman, the ultimate psychological
value, indeed the ultimate value in general, is a realization and deepening
of the soul in its widest possible sense. Hillman's goal, which can be
described as "mystical" amounts to a radical departure from not
only the medical model of psychoanalysis but also from those humanistic
models which, having rejected the metaphor of "cure," continue to
entertain notions of self-improvement, self-actualization, well-being,
understanding or enlightenment as goals for treatment or therapy (Moore,
1991). For Hillman the goal of psychology is the deepening of meaning and
experience per se; any other goal, whether it be medical cure,
humanistic self-actualization, or spiritual enlightenment, is bound to
distract us from our primary human task as the bearers of meaning and
significance. Hillman's views are almost quietistic, and they approach those
strands within Jewish mysticism, particularly in Hasidism, where devekut,
or cleaving to the God within, is the ultimate value. However, more
generally, his view is one in which every arena of human endeavor is to be
imbued with meaning and significance, and here is close to the Kabbalist's
affirmation that all human acts provide an opportunity for the
respiritualization and repair of the world. Hillman's thinly veiled attack on
humanistic psychology is, at least in part, misplaced. As will become evident
throughout this essay, Hillman shares much with the humanistic tradition.
Self-actualization, as Maslow and others have described it, certainly
involves a deepening of experience and meaning, and, and even psychoanalysts
as varied as Winnicott, Bion, and Lacan, have regarded "wholeness,"
"cure", and "self-improvement" as incidental to the main
analytic endeavor of becoming open to what is most basic and authentic in
human experience. For each of these authors, as for Hillman, our goal resides
neither in happiness nor reason, but in what Michael Eigen, quoting the
biblical phrase, calls an experience that one has "with all one's soul
and all one's might" (Eigen, 1981) regardless of how mortifying,
discordant or pathological such experience at times can be. Image and Myth as The Language of The
Soul Hillman's originality, however, lies in
his view that imagery and fantasy, rather than analysis and reflection, are
the vehicles of soul-making. Indeed, one of Hillman's most important
contributions to psychology is his insistence that the images and fantasies
of the soul should be maintained as images and not analyzed or translated
into concepts and ideas. For Hillman, the image, the dream, and, on the
linguistic plane, the story and the myth, are the carriers of psychological
depth, the bearers of soul. When we are, for example, inspired by a painting
or a movement in a symphony, it is the image or music itself which deepens
our sense of soul and not our analysis and interpretation of this imaginal
material. Psychoanalysis adopted the prevailing, and on Hillman's view,
unfortunate modern tendency to value interpretation over the object, image or
fantasy. For Hillman, the very process of
interpretation is suspect, precisely because in bringing an image or fantasy
under the rubric of an interpretation or a concept we have tamed it, made it
familiar, and essentially robbed it of its potential to frighten, enthrall,
puzzle, or otherwise work its way into and transform our psyche. Hillman
discusses a patient's dream of a crawling, huge black snake. He tells us: and the moment
you've defined the snake, interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've
stopped it and the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed
sexuality or my cold black passions... (Hillman 1983, p. 53) For Hillman the task of the therapist is
"to keep the snake there". He wants the psyche, by way of the
limitless depths of its images to "threaten the hell out of you,"
to keep you in the realm of the unknown for as long as possible, and it is in
this way that real psychological work can begin. Hillman's views here are
close to the Kabbalist Azriel of The entire world, for Hillman, has a
mythopoetic foundation and, as For Hillman, the different perspectives
which can be taken in psychology are so many myths and rhetorics which reveal
as much about the underlying fantasies of the investigator as they do about
the phenomena under his or her investigation. For example, the existentialist
can be understood as laboring under a Herculean or Promethean heroic myth or
perhaps under an Atlas myth in which he conceives of the entire world as
resting upon man's shoulders. Hillman does not, of course, say that the value
of an entire school of psychology can be reduced to the archetypal images
that guide its labor. However, he is completely distrustful of any attempt to
crown one perspective as supreme, or to arrive at any meta-perspective or
ultimate synthesis. In this he is in league with Derrida and the
deconstructionists, and only in partial agreement with the Kabbalists. The
latter, though recognizing the extremely problematic nature of the quest,
they, like Jung, never give up hope of synthesis and individuation. As psychological theorists we are like
map-makers ever puzzling over the riddle of how to project the spherical
surface of the earth onto a flat, two-dimensional plane. Each and every one
of our efforts, however valuable and true, will inevitably distort some
aspect of the subject we are studying. As psychologists (and patients) we are
in constant danger of elevating our interpretive perspectives over the
reality of our experience. This is, according to Hillman, inevitable, as we
must see experience through one archetype or another, but we should not
thereby fool ourselves into believing that our perspective is identical with
"reality". The same holds true in the process of
psychotherapy. While Hillman sees therapy as providing patients with a number
of alternative narratives (or myths) through which they can make sense of
their lives, he holds that no particular narrative can ever hold the full
measure of the soul. Indeed, for Hillman, such narratives have a dual face,
for while on the one hand they connect us to the gods and thereby provide
archetypal or universal meaning to our lives, on the other hand they imprison
us in the self-satisfied illusion that we can truly understand or explain who
we are. It is this latter settled, even stifling aspect of psychological
narrative which leads Hillman to welcome our worst nightmares, pathologies,
alien passions, and personal contradictions as signs of soul breaking through
the conceptual vessels that try to contain it. Like the psychoanalyst Lacan
(1977), who holds that only glimpses of the unconscious, hints of true
desire, can be seen through the veils of the symbolic order, Hillman places
great value on those chaotic, frightening and often evil moments of human
life where cherished beliefs break down, values are transformed and the
individual is confronted with something completely unknown. Hillman, we might
say, takes seriously the Zohar's admonishment that each individual
must heed and pay his or her due to the "Other Side." For Hillman,
like the Kabbalists, good must be drawn through the portals of chaos and
evil. What occurs on the individual level is
also present in the history of ideas. Freud's initial discovery of the
unconscious, for example, itself involved a breakthrough of a frightening
image, of an unknown abyss, an element of death, from the depths of the human
psyche. Anyone reading Freud's earliest papers and letters sees him
struggling to provide new vessels (ideas) to contain the beast which he and
Breuer had unleashed, for it was clear to each of them that the old vessels,
the old concepts of psychology had been shattered by what they had found.
Breuer was frightened and left the field, leaving Freud to carry on the work
alone. But no sooner is the beast unleashed that we find Freud (for example,
in The Project For A Scientific Psychology) busy with interpretation
and conceptualization. Indeed the entire theoretical edifice of
psychoanalytic metapsychology is just such an effort to find vessels to
contain the images of the unconscious mind. We might say that psychoanalytic
theory is itself a rational/ego process which enables us to control the
unknown in order that we can remain in our collective slumbers, not overly
disturbed by what lies in the depths of our souls. Hillman implores us not to be too
complacent in our theories. He welcomes the idea of a renewed fragmentation
in our understanding of humanity, for at those times when the old vessels
break, new glimpses into the abyss are at hand. Personification and The World-Soul Hillman does not limit the soul to
humanity, but seeks to extend it (and with that our conception of psychology,
psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis) to the world at large, to the products of
culture and nature as well as humanity. Each thing, Hillman affirms, using
the Gnostic/Kabbalistic image, has a spark of soul at its core. "Let us
imagine the anima mundi (the world soul)," Hillman tells us, as
that particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each
thing in its visible form." (Hillman, 1982, p. 77) Psychology, according to Hillman must be
practiced on the world at large and not just on people. Indeed it is the very
view that only the person has psyche or soul which places an unbearable
psychic burden on humanity, imprisoning us within our own psychologies and
removing us from any genuine encounter with the world. The view that only
humanity has soul, and that the rest of the world is dead and evil, is in
Hillman's view, a cause of the contemporary crisis in our
"environment". Such person-centeredness is also, in his view, a
major problem for much of humanistic psychology. As we shall see, psychotherapy for Hillman
simply constitutes a deep caring, love and appreciation for the soul, and
what the soul presents. The soul, considered here in its widest sense as the anima
mundi, beckons us to regard it therapeutically in all of its
manifestations. Indeed it is particularly incumbent upon humanity to take a
therapeutic stance towards those aspects of the individual and the world soul
which we would normally despise. Such a caring and appreciative attitude
towards even the world's evil is necessary because without it, according to
the inevitable logic of the return of the repressed, evil will come to dominate
us on its own terms. Those who fail to give a portion to the "other
side" , the Zohar tells us, only increase the powers of evil and
destruction (Tishby 1989, vol, 2, p. 492). It is in such a spirit that
Hillman performs his psychological meditations on such phenomena as
sidewalks, parks, architecture (Hillman, 1978, 1986) and money (Hillman,
1982a), as well as on incest (Hillman, 1987), war (Hillman, 1987a) and
"bad parenting" (Hillman, 1983a). Indeed, for Hillman, it is
precisely loving attention to the pathological and debased aspects of the
world and psyche that are likely to lead to the greatest depths of soul. Honoring Pathology In what amounts to a Nietzchean
transformation of values, Hillman the psychologist and psychotherapist comes to
regard psychopathology as our most valuable ally, our most trusted friend.
Hillman's views on pathology are central to his psychology, and these views
indeed take center stage in Revisioning Psychology, his most important
work. Central to his perspective is the idea that, particularly in our own
era, psychopathology is the primary vehicle through which soulfulness is
achieved. In the same way that Freud understood the neurotic symptom as one
path to the understanding of the unconscious, Hillman sees psychopathology as
the "royal road" to the deepening of soul. Kabbalistically, we
might repeat that Hillman is here repeating the Lurianic maxim that the
"Breaking of the Vessels" is the prerequisite to tikkun. Hillman's reasoning here is complex. On
the simplest, perhaps most Jungian, level Hillman observes that pathology,
particularly psychosis, is likely to exhibit the most salient structures of
archetypal thinking. Hillman also assents to Otto Rank's observation that
there is an intimate connection between psychopathology and creativity.
Indeed he tells us that the soul not only sees by means of, but actually
exists because of its afflictions (Hillman 177, pp. 57, 104). According to
Hillman, pathology calls forth the symbols, images and meanings which constitute
our most primitive human response to chaos, and which according to Jung are
the building blocks of creativity in literature and the arts. For Hillman, the most significant way in
which pathology deepens the soul is that pathology is a clue to desire.
Hillman makes this point quite well when he asserts: "Until the soul
gets what it wants it must fall ill again"(Hillman 1976, p. 158) and the
psychopathological symptom, is, "the first herald of an awakening psyche
which will not tolerate any more abuse." Hillman informs us: Through
depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. It moistens the dry soul,
and dries the wet, It brings refuge, limitations, focus, gravity, weight and
humble powerlessness. It reminds us of death. The true revolution begins in
the individual who can be true to his own depression (Hillman 1977, pp. 98-9) However, Hillman at times carries his
romanticization of pathology to an extreme, even going so far as to speak out
against "hope". "The message of hope", he tells us,
"only makes hopelessness darker." "Depression", Hillman
tells us: lets you live
down at the bottom. And to live down at the bottom means giving up the
Christian thing about resurrection and coming out of it; "light at the
end of the tunnel." No light fantasy; and then the depression at once
becomes less dark. No hope, no despair (Hillman 1983, p. 21). Hillman implies that there are times when
we must give in to own thanatic urges, or at least recognize their
prepotency: "the disease which the experience of death cures" he
tells us "is the rage to live". There is a sickness, according to
Hillman, in a one sided affection for life. For Hillman, it is not so much that
symptoms cloak a specific forbidden impulse or desire, but rather that
psychopathology, by leading us into a "dark night of the soul,"
destroys our assumptions about ourselves and the world, and leads us back
into the original chaos from which all passion and creativity are born. His
view is, of course, reminiscent (and in part derivative) of the alchemist's solve
et coagula (dissolve and coagulate). The alchemists held that a
prerequisite for the activity of creating gold from base metals is a
dissolution of all opposites and an achieved chaos. Jung, who brought these
alchemical conceptions to the attention of contemporary psychologists,
himself later came to realize that behind this alchemical idea lay the
Kabbalistic notion of the "breaking of the vessels." The Kabbalists
held that the process of both God's and man's creativity is predicated upon a
dialectic of destruction and rebirth, in which old configurations of thought
and being are consistently torn asunder to make way for new conceptions and
forms of life. Such a breakage can occur in a person's life and provide him
or her with sufficient chaos to be personally reborn. Indeed, according to
Perry (1974) this is the very function of psychosis. Schizophrenics
experience a disintegration of their own egos and a resultant crisis which
puts them on a quest for a renewed self. Whether or not this is a romanticization
of psychosis it is clear that there are at least some occasions in which
severe psychological suffering heralds a period of intense creativity and
renewed life. Hillman himself speaks of an archetypical need for a second
beginning: "the first start," he tells us is wiped out, "and
the world begins again" (Hillman, 1970, p. 164). The soul is deepened by pathology in yet
other ways. Psychological symptoms, particularly depression, often call into
question our most treasured assumptions about ourselves and the world. Like
dreams, whose strange and often frightening images challenge the allegorical
frames through which we interpret reality, symptoms have a disintegrative
function, leading us deeper and deeper into the unknown. Hillman attributes this
function to the anima archetype which he equates with the soul itself: By leading
whatever is known from off its solid footing, she carries every question into
deeper waters, which is also a way of soul-making (Hillman 1985, p. 135). For Hillman the unknown leads us into
chaos and chaos is inseparable from Eros and creativity: Eros is born of
chaos, implying that out of every chaotic moment ...creativity...can be born
[Hillman 1978a, p. 98] In the end Hillman concludes that there is
a divine or godly side to all pathology, that the cure of symptoms may also
cure away love, and that hope for cure is often part of the disease itself
(Hillman 1976, p. 158). In Kabbalistic terms, we must be daring enough to
extract the sparks of divinity even, and especially, from those states of
mind that seem to be completely removed from God. For Hillman, pathology is a basic
archetypal way of being, an essential aspect of all things. It is, however,
surprising that Hillman, (unlike such radical psychiatrists as Szasz and Laing)
wishes to keep the concept and symbol of psychopathology while at the same
time completely removing it from any medical, healing, or even therapeutic
context. As we have seen, for Hillman pathology is the via regia to
the depths of the soul, and the individual could not be in touch with his or
her innermost self without it. Indeed, Hillman seems to imply that this is a
necessary truth. Part of the very meaning of love, for example, is that it is
deepened through chaos, suffering and adversity. Some of Hillman's positions on
psychopathology are deserving of "healthy" critique. While Hillman
is quick to recognize the goodness, the "health" within pathology,
he curiously fails to acknowledge the sickness at pathology's very
core, and (a fact that is obvious to everyone), that pathology by its very
nature calls out to be healed and cured (and in some cases such as incest and
child abuse, outright condemned). Healing, we might want to say, is just as
archetypal as sickness, and while we may recognize the value of such
"sickness" (just as the Kabbalists recognized the "value"
of evil) this does not excuse us from our efforts to eradicate pathology (and
overcome evil) in any specific instance in which it is encountered. Hillman it seems is too focused upon the shevirah
)Breakage) and not sufficiently upon the restoration (tikkun). The
soul that grows as a result of pathology does not bear the majority of its
fruits until it is restored to health, and while one may, indeed, lose
something valuable in, say, eradicating a depression, or even a psychosis,
too soon, one can lose something far greater by failing to treat a depression
or psychosis that would eventuate, to take one particularly poignant example,
in suicide. There are depressions and other psychological disorders that are
so paralyzing, so deadening of the soul, so as to give lie to any efforts to
honor or romanticize them. The skill and art of the psychotherapist is to
comprehend when pathology may indeed by soul-deepening, and when in fact it
has become so debilitating as to demand a rapid, healing intervention. Polytheism Hillman is hardly content with turning his
deconstructive gaze on such earthly shibboleths as medicine, health, and
cure. A recurrent theme in his work is a disintegration of the one God,
which, in a reversal of Jung, also turns out to be an attack on the unity of
the ego or self. Hillman's views here would seem to be antithetical to the
most fundamental precept of Judaism, and, by extention, opposed to the
Kabbalah as well. However, if we examine his ideas closely we find that his
"polytheism" is in reality a description of the same fragmented
world and God that the Lurianists symbolize with the Breaking of the Vessels.
For Hillman a recognition of this
fragmentation is absolutely necessary in psychology. He sees, "the
psychic fragmentation supposedly typical of our times as the return of the
repressed, bringing a return of psychological polytheism" (Hillman,
1981, p. 115). For Hillman, the psyche is inherently multiple, and requires a
psychology that insists neither upon integration nor a unified subject. The
soul has many sources of meaning, direction and value, and, as Thomas Moore
puts it: The psyche is not
only multiple, it is a communion of many persons, each with specific needs,
fears, longings, style and language. The many persons echo the many gods who
define the worlds that underlie what appear to be a unified human being.
(Moore 1991, p. 36) The "therapeutic" implications
of Hillman's views on polytheism are simple but far-reaching. Once we have
abandoned the notion of a unitary, integrated self we are able to give
ourselves and our patients much more room to be who we truly are, individuals
with varied, off again, on again, motives, desires, passions and interests,
whose lives will not correspond to a single theme but will rather constitute
a tapestry of many, often contradictory, stories and directions. Hillman
himself tells us that therapy is most helpful when it enables individuals to
place their lives simultaneously within a variety of fictional genres; the
epic, comic, detective, realistic, picaresque, etc., without having to choose
one against the other: For even while
one part of me knows the soul goes to death in tragedy, another is living a
picaresque fantasy, and a third is engaged in the heroic fantasy of
improvement. (Hillman, 1989, p. 81) Hillman 's views are perhaps typical of
the post-modernist sentiment that "broken vessels" are indeed all
we have and can ever have. Unlike the Kabbalists (and Jung), Hillman is not
optimistic about the possibility of either a reunification of the self or the
world; any purported reunification or, in kabbalistic terms, Tikkun,
would be a fantasy or narrative that would hold true from only one
perspective. His "polytheism" is, unlike the Kabbalist's Partzufim
(or faces of the divine) a stage on the way to an ultimate unity. However,
like the Kabbalist's he holds that "polytheism" (like all other
ideas) exists in coincidentia oppositorum with its opposite, and that
these opposites are mutually corrective (see below: "Hillman and
Hegel"). Multiple Personality If
Hillman is correct we are all, at bottom, multiple personalities, and our
collective fascination with and resistance to this diagnosis is best
understood as an ambivalence towards recognizing the thoroughgoing disunity
within our own souls. If Freud diminished humanity by showing that one is not
the master in his/her own house, the phenomena of multiple personality
threatens us by deconstructing "his", "her", "master",
and "house" altogether, so that the very concept of an individual
human subject or self, upon which European (and American) civilization has
rested for so many centuries begins to lose its very sense. It is no wonder
that the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder causes such controversy
in the courts, the very guardians of the notion of rational, individual
responsibility, and that it is from the courts that we see the greatest
pressure to reform the theory of genuinely multiple selves residing in the
same body. Never mind that the phenomena of possession, speaking in tongues,
automatic writing, the doppelganger and deja vu have existed from ancient
times to the present day (Hillman 1977, p. 24)); never mind that a few lone
voices in our own century (e.g. the Russian mystic Gurdjieff) have told us
that our personal "unity" is the most dangerous of illusions, the
ruling authorities will hear nothing of multiplicity in the human psyche.
Twenty five years ago James Hillman commented on the stir caused by multiple
personality in the early years of this century: Multiple
personality was ending the rule of reason and so of course this phenomenon
became the focus of the defenders of reason: psychiatrists (Hillman 1977, p.
25). For
Hillman "cases of multiple personality (at the turn of the century) were
important because they confirmed the multiplicity of the individual at a time
when the same phenomenon was beginning to appear in the culture in
general" (Hillman 1977, p. 25). Today, the resurgence of this diagnosis
is symptomatic of a widespread, culture-wide return of the repressed,
manifesting itself as a rebellion against the unitary, conscious ego of the
scientific, rationalistic age, and against the centralization of political
and cultural power which the deification of the rational ego has meant in
western society. According to Hillman: New partial
personalities spring up with feelings, opinions, needs. A sociologist might
speak of subcultures; a political scientist of states' rights and grass roots
government. Whatever the category, central command is losing control [Hillman
1977, p. 25]. The Deconstruction of the Ego In Hillman's deconstruction of traditional
views of the self and his view of "multiple realities" he
"senses" and is even a vehicle for "post-modernism". In
addition his views on polytheism and multiplicity place him in league with
those post-modern psychoanalysts (e.g. Lacan, 1977) who regard the ego, and
particularly ego psychology, with considerable contempt. The notion of a
conflict-free, rational ego, in charge of the personality, is, for Hillman
and these thinkers an utter illusion. For Hillman, the unconscious runs
through everything, including psychology itself. He can affirm with Lacan
that there is no univocal speech, no absolute sincerity, no unitary self, and
nothing "in charge," from which any such univocal speech, action or
sincerity can arise. For Hillman, the ego must step aside in
favor of the soul. Indeed the job of therapy, whether it be conducted by
one's own anima or by an actual therapist, is (contrary to the Freudian
maxim) to lead the individual deeper into unconsciousness. The identification
of the essential person with "consciousness" is the faulty heritage
of Descartes and of 19th century psychology. "What brings cure is an
archetypal consciousness, and this notion of consciousness is definitely not
based on ego" (Hillman 1985, p. 87). Hillman distinguishes ego,
consciousness and reason on the one hand, from soul, unconsciousness, and
archetype on the other. Indeed, he provides us with a list of ego related
terms (such as commitment, relatedness, responsibility, choice, light,
problem solving, reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling,
progressing,) and contrasts them with anima or soul related terminology
(attachment, fantasy, image, reflection, insight, mirroring, holding,
cooking, digesting, echoing, gossiping, deepening) (Hillman 1985, p. 97).
(Hillman, by the way, was amongst the first to criticize scientific
psychology on gender-related grounds: its domination by an animus (ego)
archetype or myth.) For Hillman there is no real, deep self. There are as
many "selves" as there are archetypes around which a
"self" can be "constellated." From Hillman's perspective
Jung, who was otherwise the predecessor to Hillman's own archetypal
psychology, was caught up and blinded by a single archetype, the unified
"self". According to Hillman, individuation, like
any archetype, can be "demonstrated in texts and cases" and found
to be ubiquitous. But to make the individuated, unified self a law of the
psyche, as "the one purpose or goal of ensouled beings" is to
forget that individuation is but one perspective amongst others (Hillman
1977, p. 147). One thing is certain, whatever the nature
of the unified self, such a self must of necessity accommodate the soul's
archetypal diversity. Not simple integration but rather a dialectic between
multiplicity and unity, between polytheism and the one God, or as the
philosophers simply put it, between "the one and the many" is
necessary to achieve an adequate conception of the teleology of the
individual. As put by the Chabad hasidic thinker, R. Aaron Ha-Levi: The essence of
His intention is that His coincidentia be manifested in concrete reality,
that is that all realities and their levels be revealed in actuality, each
detail in itself, and that they nevertheless be unified and joined in their
value, that is, that they be revealed as separate essences, and that they
nevertheless be unified and joined in their "value." (Elior, 1987,
p. 167-8). Hillman and Hegel Hillman makes scant reference to Hegel and
actually lists the Hegelian dialectic amongst several philosophical ideas
which should not be imported into psychology (Hillman 1977, p. 118).
Yet it is precisely dialectical thinking with its "negating...of every
fixed category of the abstractive intellect" (Hegel, 1971, p.3) and
unlimited tolerance for opposing and paradoxical concepts and symbols which
informs much of Hillman's work. Jung, in Psychology and Alchemy held
that the paradox, in which oppositions imply one another in coincidentia
oppositorum is one of our most valuable spiritual tools because of all
forms of thought only it "comes anywhere near to comprehending the
fullness of life" (Jung, 1968, par. 18). This view, which is highly
Hegelian, is also, as I have shown elsewhere (Drob, 2000) quite Kabbalistic.
Hillman, whose views, are, in effect, a series of radical (and dialectical)
paradoxes fails to recognize the debt that he (and all dynamic psychologists)
have to the philosopher who argued that all of our beliefs involve their
contradictions as part of their very essence. Hillman's central idea of "the
deepening of soul" is far more dialectical than Hillman might care to
admit. As I have already suggested, the deepening of soul, or increase in the
meaning and depth of experience, is the highest value or goal of archetypal
psychology. Indeed Hillman uses as his motto John Keats dictum that the world
itself "is the vale of soul-making" (Hillman, 1979, p. 57). For
Hillman the classical problems of philosophy, theology and psychology
"what it is to be truly human, how to love, why to live, and what is
emotion, value, justice, change, body, God, soul and madness in our
lives", as well as the more immediate problems of sex, money, power,
family, health, etc. are all insoluble, their eternal purpose simply "to
provide the base of soul-making" (Hillman 1977, p. 149). "There is
a secret love hiding in each problem (Hillman, 1983, p. 181), problems are
"secret blessings" that sustain and deepen our souls. This view is
also Hegelian. Hegel, following Fichte, based his entire philosophical system
on the idea that the conflicts, contradictions, puzzles and enigmas of the
world serve the single teleological purpose of providing an arena for the
development of humanity's, and hence, the world's spirit. Hillman's view
hardly seems different, except that for Hegel's "Geist" (mind or
spirit) we have Hillman's "soul". The view is also Jungian as well,
for it holds that the essence of psychological life is the deepening of the
psyche's own experience, which for Jung is tantamount to the process of
individuation. Hillman implies that the twin poles of
monotheism and polytheism emerge to correct the excesses of each other in
history. For Hillman, ours is an era in which polytheism and multiplicity
have returned to correct the repressive monism of ego, reason, consciousness
and central control. And with this dialectical vision, he comes very
close to a Hegelian view of history as well. Hillman's "Re-vision" of
Psychology For Hillman psychology cannot be taken to
be a separate science, completely distinct from literature, art, philosophy,
politics, religion, natural science, and the daily affairs of the street.
Psychology, as its own name implies, must be concerned with psyche,
the soul, and not only the soul of humanity but the soul which is at the core
of all meaningfulness whatsoever. As such, for Hillman (as for Hegel),
psychology must be considered a foundational and even supreme discipline,
because "the psyche is prior and must appear within every human
undertaking" (Hillman 1977, p. 130). The ultimate goal of psychology, however,
is not to find answers and solutions to problems, but, rather, to deepen our
experience of the problems themselves. The classical problems of mind/body,
nature/nurture, free will/determinism are, according to Hillman, essentially
contestable, and can only be resolved within the context of a particular
system of thought (Hillman 1977, p. 148). But the psyche is much broader than
any of the perspectives it can take upon itself and is at bottom far more
interested in the play of its own ideas than in the solution to psychological
problems. The same can be said about the particular problems of each human
individual, how to love, why to live, what to do with respect to money,
family, sexuality, religion, etc. None are soluble, but rather the very fact
that we ask them prompts us to go deeper into the caring of our soul.
"The purpose of these eternal psychological problems" is, as we
have seen, "to provide the base of soul-making." Psychological
ideas, for Hillman, are in essence, food for the soul. Does all of this mean that it does not
matter what solutions we provide to the problems of philosophy, psychology
and daily life? Herein, I think, lies the danger of a relativistic psychology
such as Hillman's. By including everything in psychology's purview, by
denying that psychology is interested in truth, by asserting that no
psychological ideas can be taken literally, Hillman runs the risk of a
vicious relativism in which psychological ideas are devalued by society
precisely because they have been relegated to the realm of opinion. The solution to this difficulty, I
believe, can be found in one of Hillman's own ideas: the idea that the very
same life activity can be understood as part of more than one genre, more
than one narrative, at the same time. Within one such "narrative",
the traditional one, psychology is one science amongst others; its task is to
amass data and theory about a particular subject matter. However, from another point of view,
different, or even the same, psychologists can conceive of themselves as
engaging in an activity which is far more closely related to the goals of
traditional philosophy and religion, in which the concerns of the soul,
rather than human behavior or the mind narrowly considered, become paramount.
Such psychologists would, for example, be more concerned with the deepening
of experience than with curing pathology, and would place far more value on
the metaphoric language of poetry than the objectivity of natural science.
Such psychologists, I would argue, not only fulfill the vision of James
Hillman, but also the highest ideals of humanism. That a dual (or even multiple) perspective
on psychology is possible follows not only from Hillman's own view that the
psyche is multiple, but from the everyday experience of psychologists
themselves, many of whom freely, if somewhat uncomfortably, alternate between
professional/scientific perspectives (e.g. conducting empirical studies,
psychological tests, behavior therapy) and more reflective and mythopoetic
concerns, often in approaching the same subject matter or patient. Martin Buber (1958) tells us in I and
Thou that it is the "exalted melancholy of our fate" that every
"thou" must become an "it", every Godly perspective must
become an earthly one. Hillman would add the complementary affirmation that
there is a spark of divinity in all earthly things. Indeed, for Hillman, each
worldly thing can be understood from a variety of perspectives, some of which
are earthly, others infernal, and still others, divine. Stated another way,
each thing shows a variety of aspects, some of which are better approached
empirically, others poetically or philosophically. My view is that a dialectic
must occur between these two major points of view, one which reveals each to
be complimentary to, and ultimately dependent upon, the other. Such a
dialectic would, I believe, keep us open to the possibilities of attaining
psychological knowledge and awaken us to the poetic depths of soul, both our
own, and that of the world. References Bettelheim, B. (1984). Freud and Man's
Soul. Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou.
Translated by R. G. Smith. Eigen, M. (1981). The Area of Faith in
Winnicott, Lacan and Bion. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
62: 413-433. Elior, Rachel. (1987). Chabad: The
Contemplative Ascent to God in Jewish Spirituality:From the Sixteenth
Century Revival to the Present, 163-205. Ed. by Arthur Green, Elkins, D.N. (1995). Psychotherapy and
Spirituality: Toward A Theory of the Soul. Journal of Humanistic Psychology,
35: 78-98. Hegel, G. W. F. (1971). Hegel's
Philosophy of Mind. Translated by W. Wallace and A.V. Miller. Foreword by
J. N. Findlay. Hillman, J. (1970). On Senex
Consciousness. Spring, 1970, 146-65. Hillman J. (1976). Suicide and the Soul. Hillman J. (1977). Re-Visioning
Psychology. Hillman, J. (1978). City and Soul.
Irving Texas: Center for Civic Leadership, University of Hillman, J. (1978a) The Myth of
Analysis: Three Essays In Archetypal Psychology. Hillman, J. (1979). Peaks and Vales. In Puer
Papers, edited by J. Hillman. Hillman, J. (1979a) The Dream and the
Underworld. Hillman J. (1981) Psychology: Monotheistic
or Polytheistic? In The New Polytheism, by D. Miller, pp. 109-42. Hillman J. (1982). Anima Mundi: The Return
of the Soul to the World. Spring, 1982, 71-93. Hillman J. (1982a) A Contribution to Soul
and Money. In Soul and Money, by R. Lockhart, J. Hillman, et. al. Hillman, J. (1983). Inter Views:
Conversations Between James Hillman and Laura Pozzo on Therapy, Biography,
Love, Soul, Dream, Work, Imagination and the State of the Culture. Hillman, J. (1983a). The Bad Mother: An
Archetypal Approach. Spring, 1983, 165-181. Hillman, J. (1985). Anima: An Anatomy
of a Personofied Notion. Hillman, J. (1986) Interiors in the Design
of the City: The Ceiling. Reprinted in Stirrings in Culture,
edited by R. Sardello and G. Thomas. Hillman, J. (1987) A Psychology of
Transgression Drawn from an Incest Dream: Imagining the Case. Spring,
1987, 66-76. Hillman, J. (1987a) Mars, Arms, Rams,
Wars: On the Love of War. In Facing Apocalypse, edited by V.
Andrews, R. Bosnak, and K. W. Goodwin, 118-136. Hillman, J. (1987b) Oedipus Revisited. Eranos
Jahrbuch 56. Hillman, J. (1988) Cosmology for Soul. In Cosmos-Life-Religion:
Beyond Humanism. Jung, C. G. (1963). Mysterium Coniunctionis.
Collected Works, Vol. 14. Jung, C.G. (1967). C.G. Jung,
"Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower". Collected Works,
Vol. 13, Jung, C.G. (1968) Psychology
and Alchemy. Collected Works, Vol. 12. Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits: A Selection.
Translated by Alan Sheridan. Moore, T (1991) . Prologue, Introductions.
In A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman, introduced and
edited by Thomas Moore. Moore, T. (1992). Care of the Soul: A
Guide For Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. Moore, T. (1994) Soul Mates: Honoring the
Mysteries of Love and Relationships. Perry, J. W. (1974) The Far Side of
Madness. Tishby, I. & Lachower, F.. (1989). The
Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, I, II, & III. Arranged
and rendered into Hebrew. English translation by David Goldstein. All materials are © 1998, 1999, 2000
by Sanford L. Drob. No reproduction is permitted without express written
consent of the author. The Lurianic Kabbalah is treated in detail
in Sanford Drob's Symbols of the Kabbalah and Kabbalistic
Metaphors . If you entered this
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